the sound of hooves
by hulklinging
Summary: Salvation wears strange faces.


In the dark of an alley, Simon holds his breath and tries to count heartbeats. He's misplaced his keys, somewhere, and there's nothing in his pockets now, not since he grabbed at his last hit, threw away two weeks of sobriety for this, this old high, this new low. Shaking apart in a cold alley.

He shouldn't have taken so much. This isn't the escape he wanted.

When he sees the boy, he knows he's further gone than he thought, because he's seeing angels now. A pale boy walks towards him. He brings his own light into a place where there is none, stepping delicately through the filth on legs that look just a touch unsteady. Once, Simon had spent a few weeks on a fishing boat. He felt like that when he came back to solid ground, like he was relearning how to use his legs.

He looks at the boy and hears a tapping, like hooves on cobblestones, and it makes him want to cower, fills him with some deep dread. It takes him a moment to recognize it. Shame, like what he feels when he dares walk past a church. He hasn't confessed in years, not in the way he should, instead whispering apologies into strangers' skin. Misdirected worship, on his knees on cold floors, any higher power discarded for whatever substance sits in his palms.

An angel is walking through his life and either he is ODing and this is what his brain has created to calm him in his final moments (unlikely, because there is no way something so beautiful could have come from his mind), or this spectre has come for him, to burn the corruption from him until nothing is left but this rapture.

Simon feels the air leave his lungs, when the creature turns and their eyes lock. Simon's bloodshot and panicked, the angel's deep and shockingly kind. Compassion flows out of this being, those ageless eyes staring out of a young face. Simon closes his eyes, overwhelmed by that understanding he sees, and he feels what must be a tear snake down his face. He's coming apart at the seams, he bites his lips because otherwise he feels like he might start to spit tongues.

An impossibly gentle hand brushes the tear away.

"You're sitting on your grave," the boy says, and Simon was expecting bells, something musical, so the grounded accent throws him, makes him open his eyes again in shock.

"I... pardon?"

The hand leaves his cheek before he can lean into it. He feels the loss like a punch to the gut, or maybe that's just his stomach rebelling as the drugs work through him.

"You're dying."

It's so matter of fact that he can't even protest it, just lets his head fall to his chest, curling up as tight as his body will let him, like he's a kid again, waking up from a nightmare in that instant before his mother comes in to comfort him.

The boy crouches next to him, and that scares Simon more than his mortality does. He doesn't want the dirt to stain him, doesn't want his death to taint the stark white of his angel's jeans.

"You're not afraid?"

Simon shakes his head, struggles to find words that aren't half-remembered prayers. Since they day he could think, he'd questioned whether their lives meant anything at all. If life means nothing, then death can't be something to fear.

Either he says some of this out loud, or his angel can see it on his face, because his mouth twists into a frown. Simon tenses, expects some lecture on suicide (because maybe that's what this is, if he's being honest with himself, and there's no time left to be anything but), knows it damns him, but that's not what falls from those lips.

"I remember fear. It's all I can remember. Different levels of fear."

Simon's not sure if these words are for him, or something the world needs to hear. He knows the words fall into him, create ripples in the half-full vessel of his body, and he doesn't fear death but he wants to live, maybe, if only to capture this feeling, this feeling of potentially feeling less empty if this boy continues to speak.

"And now?" he asks.

The angel stares at him, blinks, and his eyes are something not human, something larger and darker and knowing.

"I'm not sure yet." He reaches out, grabs Simon's hands, and his immaculate hands look alien next to his filthy ones, but there are scars on his wrists just as there is on his own. An angel with scars. He's learned more in these few moments than in his whole twenty three years.

"How did you...?" Simon feels bold, or perhaps Death gives him confidence, because he holds an angel's hand with one hand and brushes his fingers along the scar with the other. And his angel smiles.

"Someone saved me."

His other hand isn't empty either, it holds what first looks like a dagger, in Simon's blurring vision. But when the boy brings it up and it catches the light of its curving edge, Simon realizes it's a horn. A single straight horn, as long as his forearm. He tilts his head in confusion, looks up at his angel's face, sees the round scar in the centre of his forehead.

Simon thinks of the little mermaid, turning into sea-foam, thinks of a different mythology he devoured, not in church pews but in libraries, Brothers Grimm and Forbidden Forests and the religion that holds congregations in lost forests always just a little too far away.

His saving grace drags the horn across his forearm, not as deep as the existing scar, just enough for silver blood to bubble from his skin. Simon opens his mouth, accepts his communion, and closes his eyes as the world around him grows too bright to bare.

The forests are mostly gone now, but their creatures still walk among the high rises, the streets replacing their timeworn paths. They watch the humans, forgotten caretakers of the sad, the distressed, the souls slipping through cracks and yearning for something they don't know still exists.

And every once in a while, they let themselves burn bright like their birthrights, and scorch that darkness away. Change a life's route, instead of slipping into death have them slip into their world instead, this balancing act of ancient wood and new pavement.

Every once in a while, a bruised child, a praying mother, a fallen son disappears. People mourn, people forget, people move on, and the missing ones stand up in new skin, stitched up by old magic, and learn how to be bright themselves.

Down one abandoned street, the sound of hooves. A dark horse, still unsteady on four legs like they are newly born, stares at the world with new eyes, shocked by the beauty they are relearning how to see. Their companion, a bright white horse with a single stunning horn, calls out to their companion, and the dark horse answers, and then they are gone, slipping through the shadows, running through the streets of their city, chasing a meaning they can finally catch.


End file.
